Details

Date Published

Aug. 14, 2015

CPU Clock Rate

3.5 GHz

GPU Core Clock Rate

980 MHz

GPU Effective Memory Clock Rate

6.008 GHz

Description

This is the (nearly) final upgrade to the PC I built almost exactly two years ago for gaming, streaming and watching anime. At this point nearly everything has been changed except for the RAM (still waiting on the corsair to arrive) and I have gone through a couple motherboard, fan and HDD configs. When I started my goal was getting as much gaming power as possible on a budget, once I achieved optimal performance I turned towards aesthetics and silence which has taken place over the last month.

There have been plenty of issues that I've had to solve with this build, mostly when I used AMD. My first board died in less than a year, the pcie x16 slot just stopped working, forcing me to buy a new board. On the new board, I could have killed myself during the test boot, I used some tinfoil to short the front panel pins to turn it on, and I decided that instead of turning off the power supply - I could just short the pins again to turn it off. Not only did sparks shoot everywhere, but the system no longer shut down properly. Fortunately nothing else bad happened there.

There's been a lot of good things with this build though. I can hit 4.5GHz on the 4690k fairly easily at I believe 1.242v, with stress test temps hitting around 80c, and heavy loads hitting 70c. The 760 is still powering through every game I play, I am still amazed with this thing after 2 years. I don't get into very many graphically intense games, mostly gw2, CS:GO and LoL so I will be good pretty much until I decide to upgrade.

One big thing that I knew I wanted in the build was blue, however there was a deal on this specific MSI board and it has everything I need. I was going to get the MSI z97 SLI plus, but it went out of stock everywhere. The solution was to plasti-dip the heatsinks blue, it looks pretty decent, although the noctua cooler obstructs the view of them almost entirely. I was going to paint the expansion slot covers blue too, but after feeling them and how high quality they were, I left them untouched.

Other things worthy of noting - Only one Bitfenix fan is installed, I might use the other for a future project, my mouse is a logitech g502 and my keyboard is a Roccat Ryos Mk. Glow with MX blacks

Tried to take some good pics, the first one is inside my Corsair 200r, with a non modular XFX Proseries 550w, ugh that side panel was hard to close

Power Supply

I wanted the 650w version, but I refuse to order from NCIX anymore and Memory Express was sold out, so only amazon had them for Around $150. Settled for the 550w, fully modular is super nice, way better than my non modular XFX.

It was fairly easy, taking them off of the motherboard was very simple, painting was easy, the only thing I had to be really careful about was the dragon, it was screwed and fastened down with glue so I had to slowly chip away at it to pull it off

Great build! i was thinking about making a blue build, but i could not find many blue mother boards and i was just about to ask you were you got it... and how do you like windows ten? i have windows 8.1 and i like it (i don't see why people don't) very cool build but the only thing i would change would be the blue use used i'm more of a dark blue kind of guy :)

win10 is pretty nice, although it has its flaws right now I can't say it's super worth the upgrade at this momentif you're happy with win8. Wait until around June of next year to upgrade and by then I'd imagine it will be super worth it